Queer-Decolonial Pedagogy: Undoing Binaries Through Intergenerational Learning

The most commonly used curricula for teaching gender and sexual difference come from white, middle-class, public school contexts. Little is available for community-based efforts with LGBTQ+ youth and adults who are people of color, immigrants, Indigenous, and working-class. This article explores the development, practices, and impacts of a queer-decolonial pedagogy, focusing on a unique after school program created by queer and trans educator-researchers. This program focused on preventing intimate partner and sexual violence, social justice, solidarity across difference, and peer mentorship. Through queer and trans adult leadership, this program demonstrated the benefits that come to all students when queerness and decoloniality are made central. Grounded in dialectical practices integrating teaching and research, this work illustrates six tenets of queer-decolonial pedagogy: naming place, time-play, body and lifeway self-determination, experience as personal and intergenerational, learning for healing and responsibility, and living the host-guest role. In such a practice, pedagogy lives in generative tension across distinct cultural and epistemological legacies of queer and decolonial politics and pedagogies. Taking LGBTQ+ educational research beyond inquiries into school climate, policy debates, and standardized curricula, the author takes us through a journey of collaborative innovation, exploring the possibilities of learning for diverse queer and trans students within a context of intergenerational care. Such teaching and research demonstrate how principled practices of queer-decolonial creativity transform potentials not just for education, but for undoing the binary foundations of colonial knowledge transmission itself.